2016 RIGHT HERE SHOWCASE ARTISTS & WORKS

penelope freeh

HELIOSCOPE

Helioscope is the working title of Penelope Freeh’s new work for The Right Here Showcase, created in collaboration with dance artist Donna Schoenherr of London.

Through dance, sound, and filmic imagery Helioscope brings to life the photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection, a man that changed his name three times, killed his wife’s lover - a tricky subject matter for a dance.

The movement vocabulary for Helioscope sources from this iconic imagery. The choreographers’ translation process embodies and transcends the two-dimensionality of the page, and they are keeping a playful, non-literal eye on the material. Their touch aims to be poetic, meditative and explorative.

Helioscopewill be performed by Penelope Freeh, Donna Schoenherr, six extras, and a singer. The creators are working with two living composers and will collaborate with a video artist.

Penelope Freeh dance artist

A contemporary ballet dancer and choreographer, Penelope Freeh has been a part of the Twin Cities’ dance community since 1994. She creates works that explore the ballet idiom even as they diverge from it, and she writes about her processes at her website, penelopefreeh.com. She is a two-time McKnight Artist Fellow for Choreographers and a SAGE Awardee for Outstanding Performer.

In recent years she has prioritized collaboration, working extensively with composer Jocelyn Hagen. Their chamber dance opera Test Pilot just received a MN State Arts Board Arts Tour Grant and won a SAGE Award for Outstanding Design. Helioscope is her second collaboration with dance artist Donna Schoenherr.

melissa birch

Who Moved My Child

Melissa Birch presentsher newest work, Who Moved My Child, where she presents a riotous and bold, multi-sensory theater experience. The drama centers on a hallowed family tradition that’s gone missing, causing upheavals during an otherwise ordinary Easter Sunday. Will no one say grace? The house chimes in: it’s the story of a kitchen over time where it’s easier to cook a ham than to save a marriage. Of a mudroom where the future tracks in despite best efforts. Of love notes in the laundry and a mysterious back room. By comparing/contrasting elements from Freud’s mother archetype —goodness, passion, and darkness—with Birch’s personal autobiography, Who Moved My Child mines private landscapes of family, heredity, and the personal emancipations that remain possible even as the surrounding world shifts.

Who Moved My Child formalizes a new direction for chameleon theater-maker Melissa Birch toward hybrid dance/theater forms. Choreographic elements contextualize and animate Birch’s script, on a cast of 8 dancer- actors. After investigating more socio-political environments in Flying Nuns (2013-14), Melissa tightens the screws to focus on themes closer to home.

Written by Melissa BirchPerformed by Ensemble + Melissa BirchChoreography by Deborah Jinza ThayerCo-Direction by Sharon Picasso

Melissa Birchlive artist & director

Melissa Birch’s physical theatre has been engaging audiences in the U.S (Minneapolis, New York) and abroad since first performing at the Walker Art Center in 1993.

Writer, performer and director of 14 full evenings, numerous short works and the avant-garde circus Red Curtain Cabaret, Melissa is also a professional singer. Her new ensemble work premieres in April 2016.

MEGAN MAYER

Megan Mayerdance artist

Megan is an artist working with choreography, dance, experimental video and photography. "I obsess over mimicry, tenderness, wry humor, empathy, fake bad timing and exacting musicality." Her work offers glimpses of internal terrain and unexpected expressive delicacies. By exposing tiny emotional undercurrents concerning the body, she constructs a unique perspective of what dance can be: virtuosity in vulnerability and a victory in a gesture.

Drawn to the edges of the experience of performing: the anticipatory rapid heartbeat before going onstage, and the regretful relief after exiting, her work often reveals where that switch lives in the body.

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE MY FERTILE WINDOW

Inspired by the duality of "blue-eyed soul" singer Dusty Springfield's powerful voice and stage fright, This is supposed to be my fertile window questions the purpose of anxiety, the hostile state of women's health care, the function of movement in performing gender identity, the choreography of Cholly Atkins, impersonation as performance, the embodiment of impersonation, and both preshow and postshow coping mechanisms.

CRAIG HARRIS

Craig Harriscomposer & multimedia artist

Craig Harris is the Artistic Director of Interference Arts and is a composer, designer, performer and writer. Craig creates artistic experiences that cross traditional genre and discipline boundaries, welcoming many artistic styles and embracing technologies old and new. His work includes music and multimedia performances, installations and gallery exhibitions, and community development initiatives where the arts play a significant role. He received his Ph.D. in Composition at the Eastman School of Music.

"I know when a new work has established its own life when it has completely entered my dreams, and my nightmares. And I know when that life has declared independence when sleep eludes me night after night – keeping me from falling asleep, waking me up after only 45 minutes and pushing me out of bed and back into the studio. It’s actually a perfect setting to explore Elijah’s manic world."

His multimedia production It is She Who I See was produced at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis in 2012; his composition The Hill Has Something to Say, commissioned for soprano Renée Fleming, premiered in Alice Tully Hull at Lincoln Center in New York; his multimedia oratorio Five Books—First Series was commissioned and produced by the Sabes JCC Center for Jewish Arts and Humanities. In the Twin Cities he has also collaborated as composer and projection designer with a variety of organizations, including dance theater companies Ballet of the Dolls, Zorongo Flamenco, Off-Leash Area and Katha Dance Theatre.

For The Right Here Showcase Craig is creating Elijah in the Wadi – the Seed of Conflict where we join the prophet Elijah in exile in the Wadi Cherith, as he deals with issues of enormous responsibility, extreme challenges, and struggles with isolation and despair. Elijah is known as a prophet that speaks truth to power, and frequently finds himself in isolation. His stories reveal that he is an active agent in the 8th Century BCE, has been present at momentous events since then, reappears regularly for special events in now time, and is expected to return in the future. In this multimedia hybrid dramatic work we delve into Elijah’s mind and imagination as he ponders his situation, and as he travels through time to fulfill his mission and destiny.

Epic narratives that permeate our culture reflect and shape how we think about ourselves and govern our actions and intersection with the world. During our time with Elijah in the Wadi we find that we are not mere victims of external circumstances. The seed of conflict often originates from within, and large scale conflicts are manifestations of our personal challenges.

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